Quill at iLearnNYC Innovation Institute

Quill is built from teacher ideas and feedback. On November 8th, we visited Brooklyn’s John Dewey High School to participate in the iLearnNYC Innovation Institute, a free day of learning that prepares NYC teachers to use a range of cutting-edge technologies and promote school transformation.

We gave teachers from all over the city their first go at Quill, and they gave us some valuable insight. Here’s what we learned.

1. Personalization is the vehicle for engagement

One teacher at our session appreciated that, with Quill, “you can have students work specifically on the concepts they misused.” This comment highlights the fact that the best education technology provides individualized feedback and interactivity to hold a student’s attention from the moment they’re asked a question to the moment they’ve produced a satisfactory answer. This fact is often overlooked. Many digital tools are static and set one inalterable pace for the entire class. Some students are never challenged; others never have the opportunity to catch up.

2. Learning requires effort after errors

One teacher noted that “when you make a mistake [in Quill], you have to fix it yourself.” Rather than simply revealing your error, the program “walks you through each change, step by step.” Quill gives students the authority to make decisions when writing, even if that means they make mistakes. When students make errors using Quill, they use hints and feedback to make their own changes, rather than getting the correct answer and cutting the learning experience short. Quill gives them multiple chances to change their responses. Teachers can aid in this process by asking questions: “What do you think you might have missed?” “What parts of the sentence confused you?” “Can you read your answer aloud to see where there might be an error?” Instruct your students to take the time they need on each sentence to read and write with precision. When students work deliberately toward typing a correct sentence without help, they retain their new skills more effectively.

3. Digital tools can even impact classrooms with limited access to technology

Many teachers in the room expressed a lack of 1-to-1 access to computers in their classrooms. It’s crucial that Edtech companies address this lack, and build it into their products. Quill’s answer to this is threefold:

1. Students can complete group exercises and take part in group lessons from their smartphones/tablets. At many schools, there will be far more smartphones than computers available in a classroom.
2. Quill’s supplementary nature allows teachers to rotate students through Quill’s activities at different times, or in small groups. Quill is an important piece of your ELA or ELL instruction, to be worked in with the rest of the curriculum.
3. Quill provides opportunities for dialogue. Teachers can project any Quill activity to the whole class, and engage students in discussion surrounding their choices.

We’d like to thank everyone who attended our iLearn session. Because we’re open-source, the teacher input we receive at events like this (and every day) strengthens Quill for all our users. We’ll be back for the next Innovation Institute in January!